2020 Year in Review: Country of Origin Performance Rankings

The Performance Rankings were introduced in 2012 as a statistical analysis based on the average numerical score of all cigars assessed on Cigar Coop. It is meant to serve as a barometer in terms of how the cigars were assessed.

Today we slice this data by Country of Origin – a category introduced for 2015. This is not meant to be an award, but a look at how scoring went, and what can we learn from it.

We have returned to using the adjusted cigar year method that fits our site – namely November 1, 2019, through October 31, 2020. For the 2020 year, a total of 172 (down from 174 in 2019) cigars were considered for this analysis. The average score for the entire set of 172 cigars was 89.45. (Statistically, this was down 0.54 points from 2019 when the average was 89.99))

We used the following criteria to implement this:

The cigar must have its score published during the period of November 1, 2019 through October 31, 2020.
All cigars scored were eligible regardless of release date. The goal here is to see how the country of origin performed during the Cigar Coop Cigar Year.
The majority of the cigars smoked are from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. As a result, these three countries have a significantly larger sample set than other cigar producing countries. Therefore, the sampling data has been divided into two groups – small and large. A large sampling group had 25 or more cigars assessed.

Large Sampling Data > =25 Cigars

Rank	Country	Avg Score # of Cigars (2020)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2019)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2018)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2017)	Difference (2020 vs. 2019)
1	Nicaragua	89.67 (85)	89.96 (91)	90.97 (90)	91.07 (83)	– 0.29
2	Dominican Republic	89.45 (51)	90.19 (53)	90.59 (66)	90.85 (70)	– 0.74
3	Honduras	89.28 (25)	90 (17)	90.14 (22)	90.23 (22)	– 0.72

Small Sampling Data <25 Cigars

Small sampling data is included mostly for completeness. The set of data from these countries is too small to make any assessments as a whole.

Rank	Country	Avg Score # of Cigars (2020)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2019)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2018)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2017)	Difference (2020 vs. 2019)
1	United States	90.5 (2)	89.66 (3)	91.83 (6)	88.75 (3)	+0.86
2	Costa Rica	90.0 (2)	91.33 (3)	91.50 (8)	91.75 (8)	-1.33
3	Cuba	89.5 (2)	89.33 (3)			+0.17
3	Italy	87 (1)	85.00 (1)			+2.00
3	n/a	85.75 (4)	85.00 (1)			+0.75
3	Mexico		91.00 (1)	90.00 (1)

Assessing the Results

This year Nicaragua regained the highest average score of the three after the Dominican Republic took top honors last year. It’s the third time in four years Nicaragua topped the rankings among these three countries.
For the top three countries in terms of cigar reviewed, all had a lower average than the previous year. This is consistent with our reduction in averages scores. Nicaragua had the smallest drop among the three thus helping it regain the top spot.
Coming in at 89.45, statistically the Dominican Republic averaged the same as the overall 172 cigars.
The decrease in average scores in the larger sampling set is consistent with the decrease in average scoring seen overall. all three countries in the larger sampling set have had an average decrease for the past four years.
Cigars produced in the United States, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Italy were reviewed in 2020, but ultimately each of these countries had too small a set of data, but are included for reference purposes.